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Workshop Ergaleion 3 : From one meaning to another Polysemy and borrowings in the lexicon of material life in Egypt

On September 28 2023, the " Workshop Ergaleion 3 : D'un sens à l'autre Polysémie et emprunts dans le lexique de la vie matérielle en Égypte " will be held at the Institut des civilisations of the Collège de France, organized by Jean-Luc Fournet (Collège de France), Antonio Ricciardetto (CNRS-HiSoMA) and Valérie Schram (CNRS, ArScAn-HAROC).

Ergaleion - Papyrological lexicography of material life

Conceived as part of the Ifao program " Realia d'Égypte de l'époque ptolémaïque aux débuts de l'Islam : mots et mobiliers " (dir. P. Ballet, M. Mossakowska, V. Schram), Ergaleion - Outil de lexicographie papyrologique de la vie matérielle is a multilingual database designed to study the lexicon relating to material life in Egypt from the Persian to the early Arab periods, based on papyrological sources.

One of the main aims of the database is to provide easy access, in the form of an evolving lexicon, to the results of lexicographic work recorded in the " Chronique de lexicographie papyrologique de la vie matérielle " (ed. J.-L. Fournet & S. Russo) published in the Comunicazioni dell'Istituto Papirologico " G. Vitelli ", Ergaleion has also been designed as a tool to facilitate lexicographical research around the vocabulary of realia (artifacts, materials, crafts, products, structures, landscapes, plants or animals) by defining the contexts of attestation of words, by highlighting the evolution of terminology over time, and by comparing the designations of the same reality in the different languages used in Egypt (Greek, Demotic, Aramaic, Coptic) using various visualization tools (chronological friezes and maps). Last but not least, it provides a privileged medium for systematizing the dialogue between philology and archaeology, since it enables us to connect words to the realities they are likely to designate, and to verify the presence of these realities in ancient Egypt by identifying archaeological remains.

Workshop Ergaleion 3 : From one meaning to another Polysemy and borrowings in the lexicon of material life in Egypt

This third workshop, organized as part of the research program " Realia d'Égypte de l'époque ptolémaïque aux débuts de l'Islam : mots et mobiliers " (dir. P. Ballet, M. Mossakowska-Gaubert, V. Schram) from the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology, follows on from the two previous ones, focusing on questions raised by the new exploratory online database " Ergaleion - Outil de lexicographie papyrologique de la vie matérielle ". After exploring the methodological and technical aspects involved in developing the database and linking its lexicographic and archaeological components in 2022, this workshop will focus on words in the lexicon of material life that are polysemous with the thematic axes of the Realia program. In particular, it will look at the borrowing process, through which shifts in meaning are sometimes revealed : are these real semantic remotivations, or the revelation of an unknown meaning in the source language ? What might be the motivations behind the borrowing ? Discussions on these questions by specialists from different languages, periods and disciplines should enable us to set up working groups for the diachronic study of realia whose lexicon has yet to be explored, and for which the use of Ergaleion could prove useful. A second part of the workshop will be devoted to a practical workshop on the database itself (https://heurist.huma-num.fr/Ergaleion/web).